Rough Draft (3 page)

After three weeks of Randall's silence, Hannah had almost given up, resigned to life with a mute son, a boy stunted forever. Destroyed because his mother hadn't been there to protect him.

Then one morning at breakfast as she set a plate of blueberry pancakes before him, he looked up and said, “Hi.”

She held back the tears. Pretended it was a perfectly ordinary moment.

“Hi,” she said. But Randall would say no more for the next hour.

Midmorning they were sitting on the dock, watching the mangrove snappers cruise beneath their dangling legs. Hannah's pulse was wild. Randall looked over at her and said, “I'm sorry, Mom.”

“Sorry?” she said. “You haven't done anything, Randall. Nothing at all.”

She hugged him against her chest and wept.

A month and a half after the murders, the FBI's forensics people were still nowhere. Dozens of hair or fiber samples at the scene, but nothing useful. No usable fingerprints, no DNA samples. Particles of sand in the carpet, dirt, pebbles, sandspurs, smudges of dog shit, leaves, twigs. Everything and nothing.

According to the ballistics reports and the trajectory studies done later by the FBI, a single pistol was used, a thirty-two caliber, and all three shots were fired by a person taller than six feet. Beyond that, there was no physical trace of the shooter and his accomplices, nothing but the molecules of their breath still circulating in the room and that photograph tacked to her father's forehead.

Frank Sheffield, the FBI's lead investigator on the case, dismissed the photo as a red herring. Too obvious, too convenient to be believed. According to Frank, the three men had walked into the study, grabbed the first item they saw that might incriminate some other party, and left it on the scene. Such arrogance didn't fit their profile of J. J. Fielding,
leaving behind a calling card. Anyway, the guy was a banker, a high-powered number-cruncher. Not a killer.

Oh, sure, they were still seeking him on the money-laundering charge, but he wasn't the FBI's prime suspect for the murders, not even close. There were dozens of others on the list ahead of him, bad people, serious felons, all of whom had been Ed Keller's target at one time or another. All considered far more likely than Fielding to order a hit or do the deed themselves.

With Randall back in school and Hannah on leave, she spent her days scouring old newspaper files, questioning Fielding's associates at Nation's Trust, searching for any scrap of evidence that might point to the man's whereabouts. At one point she showed up on the porch of Maude Fielding, the banker's abandoned wife. After a moment's hesitation, Mrs. Fielding invited her in, made her tea, listened to her story. Said nothing till Hannah asked the one question she'd come for, “Was your husband capable of murder?”

Maude Fielding smiled quietly.

“My dear,” she said, “who among us isn't capable of it?”

For weeks Hannah took notes, developed theories, relentlessly badgered Frank Sheffield. A nice guy, mellow, looked more like an aging tennis bum than an FBI agent. Lived in a dinky motel on the beach at Key Biscayne, ran around shirtless when he wasn't at work. Hannah knocked on his motel room door at six in the morning, ten at night, bombarded him with seven, eight phone calls a day. “Did you consider this?” “Have you looked into that?” “The shooter was taller than six feet. Fielding was six foot one.”

“A lot of people are over six feet, Hannah. And who were the other two guys with him, his chauffeur and butler?”

Frank Sheffield was always patient and respectful, looking her straight in the eye, though he must have considered her a flaming crackpot.

Because of course she was. During her years with homicide she'd often been on the receiving end of the same kind
of lunacy. A victim's family member calling every day, convinced that unless they did so the investigation would be shelved. Pestering, pestering.

But she couldn't help herself. So inflamed with rage, she couldn't stop. Picking up the phone, dialing it again, “Frank Sheffield, please.” The secretaries started recognizing her voice. Frank was in a conference. Frank was in the field.

Weeks like that. Every waking moment on the phone or at the library. Until one evening as she was setting the phone back on the hook after sharing another brilliant idea with Frank Sheffield, she turned to find Randall staring at her from the doorway of her study. His mouth twisted, eyes red.

“What is it?” she asked him. “What's wrong, Randall?”

He took a breath, a tear gleaming on his cheek.

“Please stop,” he said. “I can't take it anymore. I want it to be over.”

So she stopped. No more calls. No faxes. Nothing.

J. J. Fielding was never seen or heard from again. No one at the FBI ever informed her directly, but she knew how it worked. Without a prime suspect or fresh leads, the probe of her parents' murder gradually faded from their high-priority roster. Until finally the case slipped quietly to the Bureau's back shelves.

There were no windows in room 2307 of the FBI office building at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. An interior room, plain white walls, naked except for an FBI seal and a TV screen flush-mounted beside it. Gray carpet, and a long cherry table with fifteen green leather chairs. Five of them occupied today. A couple of minutes earlier the small talk had died away, now everyone was quiet, eyes down, sipping their coffee, waiting for Special Agent Helen Shane to arrive.

One look around the conference table and Frank Sheffield knew a serious mistake had been made. He didn't belong here. Not with these people. Unless maybe he'd been ordered to New York on a Saturday morning to face a reprimand for his total and unwavering lack of distinction. Twenty-one years with the Bureau without a single commendation. A record so undistinguished it had given Frank Sheffield a kind of reverse fame.

He worked out of the Miami field office, one of the busiest in the country, over seven thousand cases last year, six hundred-fifty agents and support personnel responsible for FBI activity from Vero Beach all the way to Antarctica. Frank hadn't heard of any major crime outbreaks in Antarctica, then again, you could never be sure when the penguin population might start acting up.

It wasn't that Frank was a screw-off. He did his job as well as the next guy. But he wasn't at the head of the line volunteering for extra duty, and he sure as hell didn't have that spit-shined gung-ho bearing that bumped you steadily
up the ladder. He served warrants, sat in surveillance vans, carried crates of subpoenaed documents from banks and boiler room operations. He sat in meetings half of every day, adding to his collection of doodles. Mostly he kept his head down, went home at five, took his kayak out on the bay, paddled ten miles around Key Biscayne, good weather or foul, and by the time he got back to his little stretch of beach, all the day's aggravations were magically erased.

Any way you looked at it, Sheffield didn't belong in this room with this bunch of fired-up overachievers who spent all their waking hours keeping America safe and their careers revving in high gear.

Across the table was Deputy Assistant Director Charlie Pettigrew who ten years ago was Special Agent in Charge of the Miami field office, Frank's boss. Somehow Charlie had parlayed one minor talent into major career advancement. Not exactly a yes-man, still Charlie was a guy who could sing harmony to any tune. Great at meetings, aligning himself with the right position. These days Pettigrew was fourth down the chain of command from Director Robert Kelly. Charlie was looking slim and spiffy, sharply creased white shirt, jeans. But Frank detected a little upper-echelon worry in his old buddy's eyes. Bigger concerns, more shades of gray than the old days in Miami, gunning for dopers, tearing holes in the cocaine pipeline.

On the other side of the table, slouching in his seat, was a kid named Andy Barth, twenty-something, with die long stringy blond hair and wolfish face of an undercover dope cop. Frank had seen the kid's picture a lot lately in internal press releases. The Bureau's computer guru, headed the cyber-crime division, fastest growing section in the FBI. Andy wore ratty blue jeans and a fresh white T-shirt. He was helping himself to the basket of Danish in the middle of the table. Taking one, offering them around, taking another. A boy with serious cravings.

At the head of the table was Abraham Ackerman, senior United States senator from New York, and Chair of the
Armed Services Committee. For a man in his early fifties he obviously kept himself gym-pumped. His dark wavy hair was swept back on the sides, and he was wearing a blue baseball hat with the FBI logo embroidered in gold on the front. Probably a gift from Director Kelly. Ackerman wore a yellow golf shirt, faded jeans, and running shoes. Very casual on this Saturday morning, just one of the guys. Former college quarterback, Penn State, missed the national championship by a field goal. Two feet wide right. Frank remembered it because he'd won two hundred bucks on the game. With a mediocre team around him, Ackerman had thrown for over three hundred yards, run for a hundred more, almost won the championship single-handedly. A man who could carry ten guys on his back, haul them to the mountaintop. He'd done it then, been doing it ever since. Maybe not an astronaut, never walked on the moon, but the next best thing.

As Chair of the Armed Services Committee, the guy was used to five-star generals kowtowing to him, sitting there in a row, chests dripping with medals and ribbons while the senior senator from New York chewed them out or blasted holes in their latest budget requests.

That morning there was a hum rising from Ackerman's flesh like the tick of radioactivity. Not exactly the look of a grieving father. Frank had seen the story on the evening news a few weeks back, Ackerman, wiping tears from his eyes, had taken questions from reporters. Joanie, his only daughter, a teenager, had been killed in a skiing accident in Aspen. Took a wrong trail in the tricky light of dusk, and smashed into a tree. Tragic mess.

But this morning the man looked like he was totally back to business. The way he lifted his eyes and measured each person in the room, his gaze swinging sharply to the doorway as Helen Shane made her entrance.

“Good news,” she said, shutting the door behind her, moving breezily to a chair two down from Sheffield, giving him a quick once-over as she eased into the seat. She set a file folder on the table in front of her, brushed a strand of
hair from her face. “I just got off the phone with Director Kelly. And I'm happy to report that we're fully green-lighted. It's a go.”

“All right!” said Andy Barth. And took a celebratory bite from a cherry Danish.

Helen was wearing black linen slacks and a clingy white blouse. She had straight shoulder-length red hair and her tense green eyes looked out from under long bangs. The rest of her face was an odd mix of slightly oversized features that somehow looked good in photographs but seemed a little out of whack in real life. He'd heard she was a fashion model in high school, on the covers of
Seventeen,
and even
Glamour.
Graduated Columbia, then joined the G-men. God knew why. Maybe Frank would ask her about it later, take her out to lunch, maybe some of her ambition would rub off. This was, after all, the lady they said was destined to be the first female director of the FBI.

Thirty-two, worked out of the D.C. field office, and even Frank Sheffield, who didn't ordinarily pay attention to such matters, was fully aware of her recent successes. The latest one had gone down last August when Helen spearheaded the biohazard unit that thwarted a major smallpox virus attack. It was Helen's team that took down the high-tech plague lab operating inside a condo only a canister toss from the White House.

Ackerman was staring at Helen Shane. His eyes jacked up to full voltage.

Somewhere down the hall a phone rang, and that seemed to wake him from his fierce appraisal. He leaned to the side and scooped up a slim leather briefcase and slapped it down on the conference table. He unzipped it slowly and withdrew a handful of eight-by-ten glossies. Ackerman stared down at the top photograph for a moment, his face going slack, the color draining.

He pushed the stack to his right, directly in front of Charlie Pettigrew.

Charlie tried to nudge the stack on to Andy Barth, but the senator shot out his hand and took hold of Charlie's wrist.

“Look at them,” he said.

“I've already seen them, sir.”

“Look at them again. I want you to keep these images in your mind. I want you to remember them every second of every day from now until you catch this fucking animal. Look at them, Mr. Pettigrew.”

Charlie stared at the photographs. He went through the stack slowly. There were five. He lingered on the last one, then slid them to Andy Barth.

Barth had a piece of Danish in his mouth when he peered at the top photograph. He flinched, didn't swallow and didn't chew as he suffered through the rest.

“I'm sure you've all witnessed autopsies as a part of your training,” the senator said. “And you have strong stomachs for this sort of thing. But you should remember as you look at these photographs that this girl, my daughter, was alive only seconds before this was done to her. This carnage. She was laughing. She was red-cheeked and brimming with life.”

Impassive, Helen Shane took her look and passed the photos on to Frank.

The girl was sixteen. Though if Frank hadn't known her age already, he wouldn't have been able to tell from the photos. She had dark curly hair and plump cheeks with a short upturned nose. But her face was spattered with gore and whatever her final expression might have been was now concealed by the mask of blood.

Her head was tilted back into a depression of snow. Around the rest of her body the snow was shadowed with blood. In the second and third photographs, the injuries were visible. The fourth and last were close-ups of the gaping wounds in her chest.